With recent developments in genetic engineering technologies, enzymes produced by transformed microorganisms are widely used. In view of the environmental safety, it has been required to prevent transformed microorganisms, which do not exist in nature, from being transmitted or diffused in the environment. In order to satisfy such requirements, physical and/or chemical disruption processes for sterilization of microorganisms are employed.
Physical containment of the transformed microorganisms used for producing enzymes requires suitable heavy equipments, particularly for industrial scale of production. Conventional method of sterilizing transformed microorganisms has a disadvantage in that the activity of the enzymes to be recovered is often impaired by inactivation under sterilizing conditions.